Miyazawa Kenji: The Buddhist Poet of Northeastern Japan

Miyazawa Kenji died of pneumonia in 1933 at the age of 37, in his parents' house in Hanamaki, Iwate. He had published one slim collection of poems and a small book of children's stories during his lifetime; both sold poorly and were quickly forgotten. The trunks of unpublished manuscripts he left behind would, over the next forty years, transform him into one of the most beloved writers in Japan.

He is the only major modern Japanese writer who never lived in Tokyo, never built a literary career, and is read with equal seriousness by children, farmers, scientists, and Buddhist monks. Reading him in English first is a lopsided introduction, but it works.

Who Miyazawa was

Born 1896 in Hanamaki, a small city in Iwate prefecture, in the cold rural north of Honshu that was then known as Tohoku. His family ran a pawnshop and lived comfortably, but the surrounding farmers did not. The contrast between his family's prosperity and the famine-prone tenant farmers around them shaped almost everything he wrote.

He trained as an agronomist, taught soil science at an agricultural high school for several years, then quit to live as a working farmer himself. He spent the rest of his life trying to teach modern fertiliser techniques to local farmers and getting tuberculosis from the climate. His health collapsed in his early thirties and he wrote in fevered bursts in the years before his death.

He was a serious lay practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism. The Buddhism is everywhere in the work, never as doctrine, always as the way the world is structured: living things are interdependent, suffering is real, and the moral test of a person is what they will give up for others.

Ihatov

Miyazawa's word for the imagined version of Iwate that his fiction takes place in. Spelled in roman letters in the original, never in kanji or kana. He described it as Iwate seen through the lens of Esperanto, in the manner of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.

Ihatov has its own railway, its own forests, its own animals. Wildcats hold trials. Chestnuts argue. The wind speaks Japanese. None of this is whimsy: Miyazawa's natural world is alive in the way the Buddhist canon insists it actually is, and the children's stories are training the reader to see it.

Where to start

Four works, in increasing weight.

1. The Restaurant of Many Orders (1924)

Two city hunters lost in the mountains find a Western-style restaurant. The signs at the entrance ask them to brush their hair, then to leave their guns, then to take off their clothes, then to rub themselves with salt and butter. They are slower than the reader to realise they are the menu.

Under 4,000 words, perfectly constructed, funny until the moment of recognition. The story Miyazawa is most often introduced through. A natural opening to his work.

2. Gauche the Cellist (published posthumously)

Gauche is the worst cellist in his orchestra. Every night animals visit his cabin to ask favours: a cat wants him to play Schumann, a cuckoo asks for help tuning its song, a tanuki keeps time on a drum, a field mouse brings her sick child to be cured by his playing. By the night of the concert he is a different musician.

A story about practice and the way other beings teach you when you let them. Around 6,000 words. Often filmed and animated, including a 1982 Isao Takahata version.

3. Night on the Galactic Railroad (published posthumously, drafts from 1924-1933)

Giovanni, a poor schoolboy whose mother is sick and whose father has not returned from a fishing voyage, falls asleep on a hillside during the Festival of the Centaurus. He wakes up on a train traveling along the Milky Way with his friend Campanella. They meet other travellers; some are alive, some are not. The journey is the test, and Giovanni is being asked, gently, what he is willing to give up for others.

Miyazawa's central work. He revised it for the last seven years of his life and never finished. It is the basis of an animated feature by Gisaburo Sugii in 1985 and one of the most often-cited works in modern Japanese culture. About 30,000 words, novella-length.

4. Spring and Asura (1924)

The one collection of poetry he published in his lifetime. Self-funded, sold few copies, ignored. Now considered the most important book of modern Japanese poetry of the 1920s. The poems use scientific vocabulary alongside Buddhist terms: a 'mental sketch' (his term) of consciousness moving through the geology and weather of Iwate.

Reading the poems in English is harder than reading the stories, because the originals depend on the visual properties of Japanese script and on a vocabulary mixing scientific Latin, classical Chinese, and rural Iwate dialect. The English translations by Hiroaki Sato and others are accurate, but you are getting maybe 60 percent.

Beyond the four

If the four above leave you wanting more: the children's stories Wildcat and the Acorns, The Bears of Mount Nametoko, Otsuberu and the Elephant, The Snow Crossing, The Bear-Slaying Hunter. Each is short, complete, and in roughly the same key.

For the late poems, look for the deathbed sequence including the famous Ame ni mo makezu (Not yielding to the rain), found on a notebook in his trunk after his death. Often translated, frequently quoted in disasters; recited from memory by Japanese schoolchildren.

English translations

Miyazawa is well-served in English. John Bester translated several stories in the 1990s. Roger Pulvers translated a wide selection of poems and stories from 2007 onward. Sarah Strong did the most lyrical Night on the Galactic Railroad. The Japanese originals are all in the public domain on Aozora Bunko. The translations are mostly recent and copyrighted.

What you get from him

Miyazawa is the writer who teaches you to read landscape morally. Other writers describe nature; Miyazawa records what nature would say if you let it speak, and what you owe it back. After enough of him, walking in a forest or watching a horse work feels different.

He is also a useful counterweight to the urban Tokyo focus of most modern Japanese fiction. The cold, the snow, the failed harvests, the prayer for the next year's rice. A different Japan, and one that the postwar urban canon often forgot.

Start reading

The Restaurant of Many Orders is the standard first Miyazawa, and you can read it in twenty minutes. After that, Gauche the Cellist. After that, set aside an evening for Night on the Galactic Railroad. Browse Miyazawa Kenji and the rest of the Japanese catalog on Pagera.